Soulfish

Replacement for someone that left late last year. Taken a while to get the advert put out, but since they were advertising my post they decided to do the tech post as the same time

If anyone wants to ask be any questions feel free to post them in this thread or send them to me in a PM and I'll do my best to answer them . For those wondering about what salaries the grades equate to then have a look at the East Sussex single status chart - http://www.eastsussex.gov.uk/NR/rdonlyres/582603F5-EC9D-4B6B-92F4-992D2D1857E2/0/SingleStatus.pdf

Our pricing is coming in at £41/person on Enterprise Desktop for 90 FTE. But as we're above the 300point threshold I do believe that pushes us into the EES (1000+ FTE) pricing structure, without strictly needing 1000+ FTE. Boy MS licensing is confusing!

I'm heading to the talk next week Richard Stallman is giving next week in Brighton - bit easier for me to get to

For some reason XenCenter likes to occasionally corrupt its AppData leading to problems like this. Another one to look out for is if you ever have a problem with memory/CPU etc utilisation not showing correctly (or at all) in XenCeter that's usually down to time sync differences between the physical hosts and the XenCenter client PC.

We only run W7 here and it was getting a few of our users last month

We've had it on two PCs. After doing a full AV scan (MS Forefront Endpoint Essentials) that couldn't get rid of it we decided to just reimage.

There was a really good discussion/presentation at the Microsoft Edugeek conference from Terry Killer at Microsoft (see IT Academy.pdf - Windows Live for the slides). The idea of site-licenses for the exam fees was also a very appealing idea, and makes the idea of offering MS certs to students/staff much more appealing!

Well each vanilla classroom we have is given a minimum of 8 network points. 4 at the front of the room with the IWB, 2 in one of the rear corners (or alternative suitable position for 1/2 PCs or a printer) and 2 in the ceiling near to the projector. This provides us with points for IP Phones, laptops, wireless points, network connected projectors, network printers, the IWB PC and any other devices we may decide should be network connected (door access control being the next big one for us!)

Best of luck mattx . Having just handed in my notice here I know just how daunting it can be!

I'm just glad I wasn't drinking last night in the pub . Having just checked the links on the MS blog post it does appear that they go to a private section of Ellies sky drive!

They're already online - How many network managers, technicians and EduGeek members does it take

Well our schools agreement also include the VDI Premium Suite w/MDOP which is licensed per device per month, and its now dropped to FTE*12 number of licenses. The VDI Prem Suite includes the RDS CAL (What) which replaced the TS CAL so I imagine this covers all of our devices, like the Desktop Suite (especially since this is a per device license and we're buying it per FTE!). For us it's coming in at about £7.30/yr/FTE.

From the quote I've got it appears that you can license SQL CALs per FTE to cover all of your devices.

If you're virtualising and using Windows Datacenter licenses its cheaper to purchase System Center Management Suite Datacenter (done per processor) and like Windows Server Datacenter its licensed you for unlimited VMs. With the enterprise CAL pack it also means that your licensed for all client/server management licenses (MLs - like CALs!) for all of the system center products We've just had a like-for-like quote on our Schools agreement from Insight. Now we license everything from MS (servers, TMG, SCCM, desktop enterprise pack, UAG, Exchange, SQL, VDI stuff) through our schools agreement. We're currently in year 2 of a 3 year schools agreement deal, so pricing is more or less what it was for us when we signed up in 2009. We've had it confirmed that we can move out of our schools agreement without penalty to EES at our renewal, and our previous 19.5k spend is currently coming in at just over 8k

Looking forward to this next week. Can't stay either night unfortunately (too busy due to having just handed in my notice!) but if people are going for a meal/drink afterwards I'd be interested in hanging around for a bit longer

I'd also say that the 10gbe on the overland is almost certainly overkill. I'm not sure you'd get past saturating a couple of GigE in most setups. The other thing it may be worth doing is holding back for the dedicated RemoteFX addin cards. Should provide better performance than high end graphics cards for RemoteFX

Another happy Dan @ WStore customer here . Always happy to help and quick to get back with prices/quotes

While my current commute is 20-30mins by car I'm looking at a job with a 2hr commute by train until I can move closer. Still not sure I want that sort of commute!

Yep - we actually host our school website on their clustered platform. Means that we're pretty confident that should the site get flooded by people trying to find the status of the school (like on snow days!) it won't get overwhelmed. Great people at TSOHost, and I've frequently had support questions answered in less than 5 minutes at 3am in the morning

Seems someones documented an Active/Passive HA solution for HAProxy at Setting Up A High-Availability Load Balancer With HAProxy/Keepalived On Debian Lenny | HowtoForge - Linux Howtos and Tutorials

I haven't looked into in depth (haven't need to think about load balancing in a long time ) but I suspect their may be a way to run a pair/pool of them in some form of HA mode.

Problem with round robin DNS for HTTP connection and dynamic websites is that you can loose the session causing all sorts of problems. When looking to load balance that sort of thing you have to start looking at things like the Ctirix NetScaler range or F5 BIG-IP loadbalancer range - starts getting expensive . You could also look into something like HAProxy - The Reliable, High Performance TCP/HTTP Load Balancer An alternative is to use a hosting provider that already does alot of the work for you (someone like TSOHost who are very good). Really depends on how big you think you're going to need to scale to.

Ahhha Richard Stallman is also giving a talk at the University of Sussex on 8th March - Richard Stallman: Copyright vs Community in the Age of Computer Networks - The IET. Just registered for this

We budget 4 per desk in an office (or teacher classroom desk), together with at least 2 at high level in each classroom/office (and 6 evenly spaced in blocks of 2 down most corridors in our buildings). IT rooms tend to get the standard treatment then around an extra 40-46 to allow for extra PCs/PC movement etc. Still think it's not enough however!